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Where Wallenda plans to walk, another tightrope was stretched

The remnants of Philippe Petit's rigging are still at Hellhole Bend, where the wirewalker planned a crossing but ran into financial obstacles. Now, the 63-year-old funambulist is fuming about Nik Wallenda's plan.

Published: Sunday, June 16, 2013 at 1:00 a.m.

Last Modified: Saturday, June 15, 2013 at 11:39 p.m.

HELLHOLE BEND, Ariz. - As construction on the anchor foundations proceeds amid Hellhole Bend's pinyon and yucca scrub, it becomes immediately clear that Nik Wallenda isn't the first wirewalker to covet this view.

There are other steel cables on site as well, anchors driven into concrete beneath parched soil, and two stubby, weather-worn block-and-tackle mounts on opposite sides of the chasm. They have been sitting in place for 25 years.

The gear belonged to Philippe Petit, the celebrated French high-wire artist whose illegal 1974 wirewalk between the World Trade Center's twin towers established him as the most daring cable walker of his generation, perhaps of all time.

But lately, the skyscraper-size butte Petit discovered in early 1988 — the same one that Wallenda will use for his globally televised wirewalking platform on June 23 — has become a ripped scab. At 63, the charismatic funambulist is accusing Sarasota's Wallenda of ruining his unrealized masterpiece.

“I am so outraged and I am extremely intellectually angry at the fact that somebody is now making my walk impossible,” Petit says from his home in the Catskill Mountains of New York state.

“Now, if that person was another artist with a creative soul and was making a magnificent crossing there, then maybe my anger would turn into some kind of respect. But I know the person who will walk there soon will just get — well, why not be cruel? — get his ass across, as they say sometimes in America, and nothing else.”

Petit says he understood Hellhole Bend's potential the moment he saw it from the window of a small plane a quarter-century ago. When the craft angled above the Little Colorado River, the view was so stunning that he called out an order to the pilot: “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

As he would tell the world many times, he had just found the canvas for his “masterpiece.” That proclamation likely came as a surprise to those who remembered Petit's achievement of Aug. 7, 1974, a performance that will never be replicated. He would call it “the artistic crime of the century.”

One day before Richard M. Nixon resigned as president, and with an assist from a tiny band of infiltrators, Petit illegally strung a steel cable between the Twin Towers of the brand new World Trade Center ahead of Manhattan's morning commuter rush.

For 45 minutes, in front of powerless rooftop police and uncounted thousands of awestruck spectators more than 1,300 feet below, Petit crossed the 200-foot void between the towers eight times. He lay on his back, dangled a leg off the wire, and even beckoned for a hovering seagull to approach.

“I rejoice at witnessing the disorder created by the announcement of my aerial escapade,” he wrote in “To Reach the Clouds,” his 2002 account of the moment. “The anthill is in turmoil! Voices and sirens scream orders and counter-orders on the roofs and in the streets, but I hear mostly the streets, where the voice of the crowd overcomes that of emergency units.”

Recalled a Port Authority officer who attempted to coax Petit back to the safety of a rooftop: “When he got to the building we asked him to get off the high-wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle. . . . He was bouncing up and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again. . . . Everybody was spellbound.”

‘High-wire Opera'

Petit was arrested, but his penalty was to perform a juggling show for children, which he would parlay into a high-wire act in Central Park.

His Trade Center tour-de-force was revisited in 2008 with an Academy Award-winning documentary, “Man On Wire.”

And yet, Petit vowed that his designs on running a cable across Hellhole Bend would eclipse that New York showstopper. He would call it “Canyon Walk: A High-wire Opera.”

And now this.

Wallenda.

Petit and Wallenda have never met.

In an hourlong interview with the Herald-Tribune, Petit would not once utter Wallenda's name. But following Wallenda's Niagara Falls wirewalk in 2012, the distinctions between two of the world's premier aerialists were conspicuous to at least one critic who compared them to Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.

In a discussion of craft and art, novelist David Churchill took note of more than stylistic divergences, from which there is no shortage of material.

Expelled from five schools for misbehavior, arrested more than 500 times by his own count for unauthorized street juggling, Petit has a rebel image that stands in sharp contrast with Wallenda's reputation for working within the system.

“Wallenda is Kelly, an athletic technician who danced beautifully, but he always looked a bit workmanlike,” wrote Churchill for the online Critics at Large. “Petit is Astaire, where innovation and inspiration naturally came together to create works of art on a dance floor or ceiling. . . . Long may both continue to pursue their passions and inspire us lesser mortals to unearth more of our own.”

At Hellhole Bend, the schism has never been greater.

Petit says he had his aerial adventure mapped out 25 years ago. Impressed by the butte's unassailable 1,500-foot verticality — he called it “Lone Rock” — Petit planned to traverse Hellhole Bend's south canyon rim and onto a vista from which, presumably, no human had ever gazed.

“It will be the spectacle of a man leaving the Earth, leaving civilization, a place where you can walk to the rim of a canyon and then arriving at a place that is a no-man's land, that is like the moon, a place where nobody has set foot before,” Petit says, still using the future tense.

Unlike previous surreptitious skywalking jaunts — the World Trade Center, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia — Petit would openly approach Navajo Nation about Hellhole Bend, which is on Native American land. He envisioned the participation of flamenco singers and Navajo musicians. At the end of the walk, he imagined saxophonist Paul Winter — with a lift from a helicopter — standing on Lone Rock to welcome him.

Environmental and archaeological impact studies, rigging blueprints involving 30 pairs of guy wires, sketches of Lone Rock and its opposing cliff — Petit says he was ready to roll in the summer of 1988. But the plan disintegrated when a producer Petit declines to name paid his first visit to Hellhole Bend.

“He was totally terrified. So much so that he could not stand on the edge,” Petit recalls. “He had to sit down and had to back up like an animal on all fours. He said, ‘No, I don't want to help you pay for killing yourself,' because he was convinced it was an impossible feat.”

Good idea gone bad

In 1999, Petit's High-wire Opera appeared to regain its pulse when a German producer approached him with impressive resources.

Petit says he submitted once more to the laborious Navajo permitting process. He ordered new equipment and recruited specially trained riggers who could rappel down canyon walls and secure guy wires for the 1,300-foot walk.

“At the last minute, when we had a deal with pay-per-view TV, we could not convince the five investors in Germany that the pay-per-view TV concept that they could not understand was the right one,” Petit says. “And out of financial cowardice, they disappeared into thin air. So we had for the second time in our life a giant fiasco.”

Flagstaff contractors Frank Mayorga and Jerry Lively remember it well. Mayorga, who recently revisited Hellhole Bend to see how well his work had withstood decades of weather, worked for his father's welding business in 1988 and says, “We never saw a dime” from the efforts.

“All we ever got was a Christmas card that said, ‘Merry Christmas,' ” Mayorga says. “Mom saw that and basically went through the roof.”

Kathy O'Donnell, Petit's longtime companion and production director, says the unnamed producer left everyone in a lurch, including Petit: “We lost $250,000 in the deal — nobody got burned worse than we got burned.”

Lively, the former owner of the only crane company in northern Arizona in 1988, says he lost somewhere in the five-figure range. Although he rattles off details of several lawsuits between him and other businesses in the dispiriting aftermath, he doesn't blame Petit.

“I did a lot of work for him, like clearing the road, but I think Petit really got screwed,” says Lively, who lives in Colorado today. “It's a shame they ran out of money — I think it was a pretty good idea.”

Walking in the sky

Despite the passage of years, Petit, an artist in residence at Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York, held fast to his Hellhole Bend dreams.

That is, until hearing “the unfortunate news that another wirewalker” had “committed the poetic crime” of using the site to stage a show.

“Let's imagine Christo a few years before he was able to get all the cast together,” says Petit. “He looks through his window and you know what? Somebody has turned little pieces of aluminum, little silk things with nothing to do with the beauty and the poetry of his project, and somebody stole Central Park from him and stole the project from him, saying ‘You didn't invent this stuff from canvas, you didn't invent the principle of hanging these garments to float in the wind.'

“So how would he feel?”

Petit's take on Wallenda predates Hellhole Bend.

Following his Twin Towers triumph, Petit remembers fans insisting he should do at least two things in America: wirewalk across the Grand Canyon, and take on Niagara Falls.

The closest he would get to the latter would be in 1986. Petit produced an abbreviated re-enactment of 19th-century French aerialist Charles “The Great” Blondin's downriver exploits at Niagara Falls for an IMAX film.

That movie, “Niagara: Miracles, Myths and Magic,” played at Niagara Falls State Park's Adventure Theater last summer as 110,000 spectators gathered to watch Wallenda make the unprecedented walk over the lip of Horseshoe Falls. More than 13 million others tuned in on ABC.

Petit dismisses Wallenda's walk as a coarse stunt because of the safety tether the network forced Wallenda to wear. He calls the dangling counterweights needed to stabilize Wallenda's 2-inch steel cable “ugly,” and he criticized the shoulder harness Wallenda used to support the balancing pole. Petit says a real Niagara wirewalk has yet to be executed.

“I don't know why people say he has guts, whoa, he has nerve, whoa — I don't think they were inspired,” Petit says. “Certainly, I was not inspired because he was an uninspiring actor. I'm not impressed when I see something dangerous or something technically complex.”

Petit says he expects more of the same from Hellhole Bend.

“Well, there might be some music, and we know he will talk to God, you know, through a little, whatever, 21st-century machine. But this is very far from what wirewalking is,” says Petit, whose extensive legacy includes the Eiffel Tower and a Frankfurt wirewalk before 500,000 people to celebrate the German city's 1,200th birthday.

“Wirewalking is a man or a woman walking freely in the sky and inspiring others because we have forgotten that long, long ago, we had feathers and we were of the family of birds, and we explored the sky.”

The next project

Back in Sarasota, Wallenda, during a backyard practice break, says he had no idea about Petit's designs on Hellhole Bend until 2008, when Flagstaff location scout P.J. Connolly guided him there. He says the site was clearly the most impressive of the many Arizona candidates he visited.

Wallenda, who will walk from the butte to the south rim — the opposite direction from Petit's dormant High-wire Opera — concedes he and Petit do agree on one thing about the venue: “It's a masterpiece. It's nature.”

“It's God's masterpiece,” adds his wife, Erendira.

To that end, Wallenda says he intends to clear Petit's rigging, as well as his own, from Hellhole Bend after the wirewalk.

Wallenda waves off Petit's other critiques, except to remind people he needed the balance pole shoulder harness at Niagara Falls in order to hoist 60 cumbersome pounds of camera and battery equipment, affording viewers bird's-eye angles.

“We'll let the readers decide,” he says. “I'm not an artiste, I'm an artist.

“The idea that I'm stealing his artistic visions is a little weird. I mean, if I don't get to Turkey,” he says, alluding to his goal of crossing a gorge designating Eurasia's continental divide, “another wirewalker will, and I'll say, ‘More power to him.' ”

Wallenda smiles as he ponders the remote prospects for meeting Petit. “If he showed up, and he was respectful, I'd be honored. Maybe he'd even learn my name,” he says. “It's Nik. Now in German — Nik. Now in French — Nik.

“It's Nik.”

The encounter seems unlikely. Petit says he's working on an Easter Island project involving the Moai, the mysterious prehistoric stone statues that have made the Pacific site so famous.

<p><em>HELLHOLE BEND, Ariz.</em> - As construction on the anchor foundations proceeds amid Hellhole Bend's pinyon and yucca scrub, it becomes immediately clear that Nik Wallenda isn't the first wirewalker to covet this view.</p><p>There are other steel cables on site as well, anchors driven into concrete beneath parched soil, and two stubby, weather-worn block-and-tackle mounts on opposite sides of the chasm. They have been sitting in place for 25 years.</p><p>The gear belonged to Philippe Petit, the celebrated French high-wire artist whose illegal 1974 wirewalk between the World Trade Center's twin towers established him as the most daring cable walker of his generation, perhaps of all time.</p><p>But lately, the skyscraper-size butte Petit discovered in early 1988 — the same one that Wallenda will use for his globally televised wirewalking platform on June 23 — has become a ripped scab. At 63, the charismatic funambulist is accusing Sarasota's Wallenda of ruining his unrealized masterpiece.</p><p>“I am so outraged and I am extremely intellectually angry at the fact that somebody is now making my walk impossible,” Petit says from his home in the Catskill Mountains of New York state.</p><p>“Now, if that person was another artist with a creative soul and was making a magnificent crossing there, then maybe my anger would turn into some kind of respect. But I know the person who will walk there soon will just get — well, why not be cruel? — get his ass across, as they say sometimes in America, and nothing else.”</p><p>Petit says he understood Hellhole Bend's potential the moment he saw it from the window of a small plane a quarter-century ago. When the craft angled above the Little Colorado River, the view was so stunning that he called out an order to the pilot: “Stop! Stop! Stop!”</p><p>As he would tell the world many times, he had just found the canvas for his “masterpiece.” That proclamation likely came as a surprise to those who remembered Petit's achievement of Aug. 7, 1974, a performance that will never be replicated. He would call it “the artistic crime of the century.”</p><p>One day before Richard M. Nixon resigned as president, and with an assist from a tiny band of infiltrators, Petit illegally strung a steel cable between the Twin Towers of the brand new World Trade Center ahead of Manhattan's morning commuter rush.</p><p>For 45 minutes, in front of powerless rooftop police and uncounted thousands of awestruck spectators more than 1,300 feet below, Petit crossed the 200-foot void between the towers eight times. He lay on his back, dangled a leg off the wire, and even beckoned for a hovering seagull to approach.</p><p>“I rejoice at witnessing the disorder created by the announcement of my aerial escapade,” he wrote in “To Reach the Clouds,” his 2002 account of the moment. “The anthill is in turmoil! Voices and sirens scream orders and counter-orders on the roofs and in the streets, but I hear mostly the streets, where the voice of the crowd overcomes that of emergency units.”</p><p>Recalled a Port Authority officer who attempted to coax Petit back to the safety of a rooftop: “When he got to the building we asked him to get off the high-wire but instead he turned around and ran back out into the middle. . . . He was bouncing up and down. His feet were actually leaving the wire and then he would resettle back on the wire again. . . . Everybody was spellbound.”</p><p><B>'High-wire Opera'</b></p><p>Petit was arrested, but his penalty was to perform a juggling show for children, which he would parlay into a high-wire act in Central Park.</p><p>His Trade Center tour-de-force was revisited in 2008 with an Academy Award-winning documentary, “Man On Wire.”</p><p>And yet, Petit vowed that his designs on running a cable across Hellhole Bend would eclipse that New York showstopper. He would call it “Canyon Walk: A High-wire Opera.”</p><p>And now this.</p><p>Wallenda.</p><p>Petit and Wallenda have never met.</p><p>In an hourlong interview with the Herald-Tribune, Petit would not once utter Wallenda's name. But following Wallenda's Niagara Falls wirewalk in 2012, the distinctions between two of the world's premier aerialists were conspicuous to at least one critic who compared them to Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.</p><p>In a discussion of craft and art, novelist David Churchill took note of more than stylistic divergences, from which there is no shortage of material. </p><p>Expelled from five schools for misbehavior, arrested more than 500 times by his own count for unauthorized street juggling, Petit has a rebel image that stands in sharp contrast with Wallenda's reputation for working within the system.</p><p>Churchill noted Wallenda's seven generational ties to the circus, versus Petit's learning to wirewalk at 16. There was Wallenda's Christianity versus Petit's atheism, Wallenda's pragmatism and family-man commitments, Petit's aversion to commercialism and bachelor lifestyle.</p><p>“Wallenda is Kelly, an athletic technician who danced beautifully, but he always looked a bit workmanlike,” wrote Churchill for the online Critics at Large. “Petit is Astaire, where innovation and inspiration naturally came together to create works of art on a dance floor or ceiling. . . . Long may both continue to pursue their passions and inspire us lesser mortals to unearth more of our own.”</p><p>At Hellhole Bend, the schism has never been greater.</p><p>Petit says he had his aerial adventure mapped out 25 years ago. Impressed by the butte's unassailable 1,500-foot verticality — he called it “Lone Rock” — Petit planned to traverse Hellhole Bend's south canyon rim and onto a vista from which, presumably, no human had ever gazed.</p><p>“It will be the spectacle of a man leaving the Earth, leaving civilization, a place where you can walk to the rim of a canyon and then arriving at a place that is a no-man's land, that is like the moon, a place where nobody has set foot before,” Petit says, still using the future tense.</p><p>Unlike previous surreptitious skywalking jaunts — the World Trade Center, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia — Petit would openly approach Navajo Nation about Hellhole Bend, which is on Native American land. He envisioned the participation of flamenco singers and Navajo musicians. At the end of the walk, he imagined saxophonist Paul Winter — with a lift from a helicopter — standing on Lone Rock to welcome him.</p><p>Environmental and archaeological impact studies, rigging blueprints involving 30 pairs of guy wires, sketches of Lone Rock and its opposing cliff — Petit says he was ready to roll in the summer of 1988. But the plan disintegrated when a producer Petit declines to name paid his first visit to Hellhole Bend.</p><p>“He was totally terrified. So much so that he could not stand on the edge,” Petit recalls. “He had to sit down and had to back up like an animal on all fours. He said, 'No, I don't want to help you pay for killing yourself,' because he was convinced it was an impossible feat.”</p><p><B>Good idea gone bad</b></p><p>In 1999, Petit's High-wire Opera appeared to regain its pulse when a German producer approached him with impressive resources.</p><p>Petit says he submitted once more to the laborious Navajo permitting process. He ordered new equipment and recruited specially trained riggers who could rappel down canyon walls and secure guy wires for the 1,300-foot walk.</p><p>“At the last minute, when we had a deal with pay-per-view TV, we could not convince the five investors in Germany that the pay-per-view TV concept that they could not understand was the right one,” Petit says. “And out of financial cowardice, they disappeared into thin air. So we had for the second time in our life a giant fiasco.”</p><p>Today, except for the severed cable at Hellhole Bend — reportedly cut to make room for an unrelated TV commercial — Petit's handiwork remains largely intact. To reach the Discovery Channel/NBC production area, visitors follow the bumpy south-rim trail Petit cleared with heavy equipment. That jagged artery is being upgraded for Wallenda's imminent challenge.</p><p>Petit was hardly the only one disappointed by the “fiasco.”</p><p>Flagstaff contractors Frank Mayorga and Jerry Lively remember it well. Mayorga, who recently revisited Hellhole Bend to see how well his work had withstood decades of weather, worked for his father's welding business in 1988 and says, “We never saw a dime” from the efforts.</p><p>“All we ever got was a Christmas card that said, 'Merry Christmas,' ” Mayorga says. “Mom saw that and basically went through the roof.”</p><p>Kathy O'Donnell, Petit's longtime companion and production director, says the unnamed producer left everyone in a lurch, including Petit: “We lost $250,000 in the deal — nobody got burned worse than we got burned.”</p><p>Lively, the former owner of the only crane company in northern Arizona in 1988, says he lost somewhere in the five-figure range. Although he rattles off details of several lawsuits between him and other businesses in the dispiriting aftermath, he doesn't blame Petit.</p><p>“I did a lot of work for him, like clearing the road, but I think Petit really got screwed,” says Lively, who lives in Colorado today. “It's a shame they ran out of money — I think it was a pretty good idea.”</p><p><B>Walking in the sky</b></p><p>Despite the passage of years, Petit, an artist in residence at Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York, held fast to his Hellhole Bend dreams.</p><p>That is, until hearing “the unfortunate news that another wirewalker” had “committed the poetic crime” of using the site to stage a show.</p><p>Petit draws an analogy to Bulgarian-born environmental artist Christo, whose 2005 Central Park project “The Gates” — involving 7,503 saffron-fabric banners — took 30 years to produce. </p><p>“Let's imagine Christo a few years before he was able to get all the cast together,” says Petit. “He looks through his window and you know what? Somebody has turned little pieces of aluminum, little silk things with nothing to do with the beauty and the poetry of his project, and somebody stole Central Park from him and stole the project from him, saying 'You didn't invent this stuff from canvas, you didn't invent the principle of hanging these garments to float in the wind.'</p><p>“So how would he feel?”</p><p>Petit's take on Wallenda predates Hellhole Bend.</p><p>Following his Twin Towers triumph, Petit remembers fans insisting he should do at least two things in America: wirewalk across the Grand Canyon, and take on Niagara Falls.</p><p>The closest he would get to the latter would be in 1986. Petit produced an abbreviated re-enactment of 19th-century French aerialist Charles “The Great” Blondin's downriver exploits at Niagara Falls for an IMAX film.</p><p>That movie, “Niagara: Miracles, Myths and Magic,” played at Niagara Falls State Park's Adventure Theater last summer as 110,000 spectators gathered to watch Wallenda make the unprecedented walk over the lip of Horseshoe Falls. More than 13 million others tuned in on ABC.</p><p>Petit dismisses Wallenda's walk as a coarse stunt because of the safety tether the network forced Wallenda to wear. He calls the dangling counterweights needed to stabilize Wallenda's 2-inch steel cable “ugly,” and he criticized the shoulder harness Wallenda used to support the balancing pole. Petit says a real Niagara wirewalk has yet to be executed.</p><p>“I don't know why people say he has guts, whoa, he has nerve, whoa — I don't think they were inspired,” Petit says. “Certainly, I was not inspired because he was an uninspiring actor. I'm not impressed when I see something dangerous or something technically complex.”</p><p>Petit says he expects more of the same from Hellhole Bend.</p><p>“Well, there might be some music, and we know he will talk to God, you know, through a little, whatever, 21st-century machine. But this is very far from what wirewalking is,” says Petit, whose extensive legacy includes the Eiffel Tower and a Frankfurt wirewalk before 500,000 people to celebrate the German city's 1,200th birthday.</p><p>“Wirewalking is a man or a woman walking freely in the sky and inspiring others because we have forgotten that long, long ago, we had feathers and we were of the family of birds, and we explored the sky.”</p><p><B>The next project</b></p><p>Back in Sarasota, Wallenda, during a backyard practice break, says he had no idea about Petit's designs on Hellhole Bend until 2008, when Flagstaff location scout P.J. Connolly guided him there. He says the site was clearly the most impressive of the many Arizona candidates he visited.</p><p>Wallenda, who will walk from the butte to the south rim — the opposite direction from Petit's dormant High-wire Opera — concedes he and Petit do agree on one thing about the venue: “It's a masterpiece. It's nature.”</p><p>“It's God's masterpiece,” adds his wife, Erendira.</p><p>To that end, Wallenda says he intends to clear Petit's rigging, as well as his own, from Hellhole Bend after the wirewalk.</p><p>Wallenda waves off Petit's other critiques, except to remind people he needed the balance pole shoulder harness at Niagara Falls in order to hoist 60 cumbersome pounds of camera and battery equipment, affording viewers bird's-eye angles.</p><p>“We'll let the readers decide,” he says. “I'm not an artiste, I'm an artist.</p><p>“The idea that I'm stealing his artistic visions is a little weird. I mean, if I don't get to Turkey,” he says, alluding to his goal of crossing a gorge designating Eurasia's continental divide, “another wirewalker will, and I'll say, 'More power to him.' ”</p><p>Wallenda smiles as he ponders the remote prospects for meeting Petit. “If he showed up, and he was respectful, I'd be honored. Maybe he'd even learn my name,” he says. “It's Nik. Now in German — Nik. Now in French — Nik.</p><p>“It's Nik.”</p><p>The encounter seems unlikely. Petit says he's working on an Easter Island project involving the Moai, the mysterious prehistoric stone statues that have made the Pacific site so famous.</p>